Yahoo Photos out, Flickr in, Flickr video coming soon
Every year Outcast PR has a CEO dinner, with the local Silicon Valley journalists and their clients. Whenever you have a group of tech journalists paired with CEOs of tech companies, it's like barracuda searching for prey. TechCruncher Mike Arrington was sitting next to Brad Garlinghouse, author of the famous Peanut Butter Manifesto and senior vice president of Communications, Communities, and Front Doors at Yahoo, and Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr, during the dinner party, and they spilled the beans to Mike that Yahoo Photos, which hosts over a billion photos, would cease to exist in the next few months. Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in March 2005, will be the photo site of record for Yahoo.
This consolidation of photo sites was one of the recommendations Garlinghouse made in his Peanut Butter Manifesto, which included recommendations on better focus its resources and services. Yahoo Photo users will have the option of moving to Flickr or to external sites, such as Shutterfly or Photobucket.
Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of Communications, Communities, and Front Doors at Yahoo
Combining Flickr and Yahoo Photos will simplify Yahoo's offering. It's a move that won't monetarily affect the company adversely. Yahoo basically pays for the storage, and Flickr is growing faster than Yahoo Photos ahd has more of a Web 2.0 heritage. The team that developed the advanced AJAX interface for Yahoo Photos will be working in Stewart Butterfield's Flickr group. While I was talking with Butterfield, along with Arrington, Robert Scoble and Steve Gillmor of Podtech.net at the Outcast party, Butterfield said that Flickr would soon have support for videos a la YouTube in addition to photos, a move that has long been expected.